Better Conversations with Primary Progressive Aphasia

What's Primary Progressive Aphasia?

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a term that refers to a group of dementias that affect a person’s speech and language. There are three main variants of PPA called progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), semantic dementia (SD) and logopenic aphasia (LPA). Each PPA variant results in a different profile of communication difficulties. 

Who is the resource for?

This resource is for speech and language therapists working with people with any variant of PPA.  Using this resource, speech and language therapists can help the person with PPA and their communication partner have better conversations.  A communication partner could be the person's spouse or life-partner, adult child or close friend.

What's in the resource?

Various online modules that the user can work through at their own pace to learn about the evidence base for communication partner training and BCPPA, what conversation is like when you have PPA, how to make videos and measure the outcomes of BCPPA.  It also contains the BCPPA intervention programme with session plans and handouts for speech and language therapists/pathologists to deliver.  Importantly, BCPPS provides guidance on how to plan for the future, how to review the conversation strategies and anticipate what to change as the disease progresses.  The BCPPA resource is under development, however, on the BC Downloads webpage you can find some of our materials e.g. 'Better Conversations - Helpful prompts for conversations'.

What’s the evidence?  

BCPPA was co-produced with people with PPA and their families. The paper reporting our BCPPC intervention pilot-feasibilty outcomes research is:

Volkmer, A., Walton, H., Swinburn, K., Spector, A., Warren, J. D., & Beeke, S. (2022). Results from a randomised controlled pilot study of the Better Conversations with Primary Progressive Aphasia (BCPPA) communication partner training program for people with PPA and their communication partners.

There is a BCPPA case study in our book:

Beeke, S. & Bloch, S. (2023) Better Conversations with Communication Difficulties: A Practical Guide for Clinicians. J & R Press.